My, O my. It seems like an eternity since my last update on the clutch article so I thought I'd better give the good people of jtan who are interested in the Black Lightning Project a word or two on it's progress.

As you probably recall there were a few changes that were in order, and were deemed quite necessary if there would be any chance of grabbing that ever so elusive World Land Speed Record for the Vincent marquee.

The clutch of course, has already been designed and built. The transmission has been rebuilt. A lot of R & D went into that three week project. More on that later.

I mentioned that a gear train would be designed and manufactured which would replace the HYVO chain that coupled the engines together. The HYVO never did work that well; constant chain adjustment and maintenance was required after every start up and run. Not to my liking. so knowing that this was the thing to do, also knowing that this was a major, major time consuming and costly improvement, Mad Max grit his teeth, set the alarm for 4:00 a.m. daily, and dedicated six weeks of his life to making swarfs from 109 pounds of 70-75 T7 aluminum, 15 pounds of 4130 steel, and five 21 tooth 4 inch in diameter gears. After a trip to the heat treat guy and a couple of trips to my daughter's place of work (a space age machine shop, they have an E.D.M. machine) It's all done and bullet proof.

It reminds me of the story of Michaelangelo standing by his statue of David. A guy staring at the work asked, "How did you do that?" Mike answered, "I just chipped away everything that wasn't David." :o))